Is the World Ready for the Waterless Urinal?

In a laboratory 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, a mechanical penis sputters to life. A technician starts a timer as a stream of water erupts from the apparatus’s brass tip, arcing into a urinal mounted exactly 12 inches away. James Krug smiles. His latest back-splatter experiment is under way.

Krug is an unusual entrepreneur. Twenty years ago, he was a rising star in the film and television business. He served as a vice president of the Disney Channel in the 1980s and ran a distribution company with members of the Disney family in the ’90s. But 11 years ago, Krug became convinced that the world did not need another TV show. What it needed was a better urinal.

His transformation from Hollywood player to urinal evangelist began in 1999 at the Universal Studios Hilton in LA. A business acquaintance of Krug knew that he was interested in exploring new opportunities and arranged a meeting with Ditmar Gorges, a German engineer who fervently believed that flushing a urinal was a waste of water. Sitting in the Hilton lobby, Gorges gushed potty talk. He explained that he had invented a water-free urinal and pointed out that urine was already liquid—and a generally sterile liquid at that. Gravity could drain it completely. No flush necessary

Krug immediately grasped the implications: The German’s humble innovation had the potential to save millions of gallons of water at a time when demand for the natural resource was draining aquifers dry. It would do more than any film or TV show to solve a pressing problem. Krug decided to help.

Drawing on sales skills he’d honed at the Cannes Film Festival, Krug dived into the bathroom business. He formed Falcon Waterfree Technologies with Gorges and explained to anyone who would listen that the water-free urinal would save more than just water: In California, a fifth of the electrical output was consumed by processing and pumping water. Cutting water usage would reduce our carbon footprint.

Falcon wasn’t the first to develop a waterless urinal. A company near San Diego had been struggling to sell them since 1991. But Krug made a conceptual breakthrough: The real profits wouldn’t come from the urinals themselves. They’d come from selling the replaceable cartridges that sat in each of the waterless receptacles.

In a traditional urinal, water pools in the drain after every flush, preventing sewer gases from escaping into living areas. Gorges’ invention employed a plastic cartridge filled with a liquid sealant. Urine could pass through, but sewer gases remained trapped beneath the sealant—no water needed. The $40 cartridge had to be replaced after 7,000 uses, turning a onetime urinal purchase into a perpetual income stream. Krug’s business model took a page out of the Gillette playbook: Keep the urinal cost low and lock customers in to buying the cartridges.

He quickly won converts. Cable tycoon Marc Nathanson made a substantial investment in early 2000, and in 2001 Falcon began to manufacture its urinal, dubbed the U1P. Soon Al Gore signed on as an adviser, and in 2006, Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay, made a significant investment. Krug was sure the world was ready for a better bowl—there hadn’t been any major advances in urinal technology for decades—but there was something he wasn’t prepared for: the plumbers.

Mike Massey didn’t like Krug’s urinal. As head of PIPE, a plumbing union advocacy group in Southern California, Massey looks out for plumbers’ interests. And as far as he was concerned, the waterless urinal was a threat to public health. Diseases might fester because the urinals weren’t being washed down with every use. Sewer gasses might leak through the cartridge. “People take plumbing for granted,” Massey says. “But the reality is that plumbers protect the health of the nation. That’s how we think of our job.”

Plumbing codes never contemplated a urinal without water. As a result, Falcon’s fixtures couldn’t be installed legally in most parts of the country. Krug assumed it would be a routine matter to amend the model codes on which most state and city codes are based, but Massey and other plumbers began to argue vehemently against it. The reason the urinal hadn’t changed in decades was because it worked, they argued. Urine could be dangerous, Massey said, and the urinal was not something to trifle with. As a result, in 2003 the organizations that administer the two dominant model codes in the US rejected Falcon’s request to permit installation of waterless urinals. “The plumbers blindsided us,” Krug says. “We didn’t understand what we were up against.”

Krug scrambled to counter the plumbers’ public health claims. He hired Charles Gerba, a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona. Gerba studies “filth, pestilence, and disease,” with an emphasis on the bathroom, and says he has done more field studies on the toilet than anyone else in academia. From his point of view, there was a clear explanation for the plumbers’ resistance: It drained their wallets. “Plumbers don’t like the waterless urinal because it cuts down on their work tremendously,” he says. “There’s no more piping to install, and the urinals have no moving parts to repair.”

To test the plumbers’ assertions, Gerba compared a traditional flush urinal with the Falcon waterless. He found that the Falcon urinal presented a less hospitable environment for germs than constantly moistened conventional bowls. The process of flushing could actually eject those germs into the air. “If it’s a traditional urinal, you should flush and run,” Gerba says.

The plumbers reject the contention that their opposition was an attempt to protect their livelihoods. “We just weren’t so sure this was a good product,” Massey says. “People think we’re a bunch of dumb plumbers, but we’re actually quite sophisticated.”

To buttress their health claims, plumbing unions in California hired Phyllis Fox, an environmental engineer and water quality specialist. She conducted her own analysis, which involved visiting men’s rooms to acquaint herself with the subject matter. Fox didn’t perform any tests, but by examining the designs of the Falcon and other waterless urinals, she concluded that hydrogen sulfide gases in the sewer lines could escape when the cartridges were replaced, resulting in “unconsciousness, respiratory paralysis, and death.” In other words, the waterless urinal could kill.

How It
Doesn’t Flush

Falcon Waterfree Technologies holds eight patents on its urinal. Here’s how it works.

3 As the urine descends through the cartridge chamber, its flow collides with a barrier, which prevents turbulence from displacing the floating sealant.

4 Urine passes beneath the barrier and into the exit chamber. When the urine level reaches the height of the drain, it spills over and empties into the outbound sewer pipe.

Illustration: Peter Grundy

Krug was forced to alter his strategy. With the path to rewriting the model codes blocked, he began to wage a city-by-city assault. He hired Daniel Gleiberman, a governmental affairs specialist, to convince local authorities that Falcon’s urinals were safe. In 2003, Gleiberman helped persuade officials in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, to grant a limited exception to their plumbing code. As a result, Falcon was able to begin selling its urinals to St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh. Those units have been in operation since 2004. So far, there have been no urinal-related deaths.

Gleiberman began to win exceptions across the country. The military agreed to test the urinals at Fort Huachucha, a base in water-strapped southern Arizona. Craig Hansen, the base’s energy engineering technician, decided to retrofit all 740 of his urinals over the objection of local plumbers. “The plumbers felt that these things were a threat to their livelihood,” Hansen says. “They don’t like change.”

The soldiers at the base didn’t like the change either. Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle? In one building, the complaints were so vociferous that Hansen started an investigation. He found that the bathrooms did indeed stink, but the urinals appeared clean. He suspected there was something else going on and decided a little experiment might flush out the problem. He bought a smoke bomb, lit the fuse, dropped it down the main sewer line, and waited.

Theoretically, the smoke should not have entered the building. Plumbers install a U-shaped drain in every sink, toilet, shower, and bath so the pooled water in the U—called the trap—blocks sewer gases from escaping. But suddenly, smoke filled the building. Something was very wrong.

Hansen observed that the sewer vent outside the building was placed directly in front of the structure’s air intake. Smoke flowed out of the vent and was immediately sucked back into the building. He also found a cracked toilet in the women’s rest room that spewed smoke. The urinals, however, emitted nothing. The cartridges were doing their job. Hansen moved the sewer vent and replaced the cracked toilet. The complaints stopped. Hansen concluded that the smell had always been there, but people didn’t have anything to blame it on until the new urinals arrived.

The flushless urinals cut water consumption dramatically at the base. Hansen figures he saves millions of gallons of water, offsetting the cost of the cartridges. The US Army Corp of Engineers took notice and mandated in 2006 that the Army install only waterless urinals from 2010 onward.

From the start, the plumbers came out swinging. When the Los Angeles City Council met to consider approval of waterless urinals in 2003, Massey and others showed up to protest. One even donned germ-fighting gloves and a face mask. In light of this opposition, the council tabled the issue.

Massey didn’t let up. He hired a lobbyist, and unions across the country were organizing against the urinals. In 2006, Plumbers Union Local 690 in Philadelphia and other plumbing and contractors’ associations took out a full-page ad in the Northeast Times headlined, “Waterless Urinals—Setting the Record Straight.” The ad cited Phyllis Fox’s research and concluded, “This is not a union issue… Waterless urinals are a threat to the health of this nation.” That same year, the organization that oversees the Uniform Plumbing Code, one of the two dominant model codes, again rejected Falcon’s proposed amendments. Since the code is updated only once every three years, Krug would have to wait till 2009 to try again.

Still, Krug and Gleiberman did make progress. The other dominant set of regulations—the International Plumbing Code—accepted waterless urinals in 2006. The IPC serves as a template for about half the country, largely in the east, and Gleiberman says that it’s less influenced by the unions. With IPC approval, Krug was finally able to start marketing his product broadly.

Massey knew that Falcon was a formidable opponent. He had researched the company’s directors and learned that lead investor Marc Nathanson was a well-connected democrat, a friend of Bill Clinton’s, and a billionaire. “Not a guy to pick a fight with,” Massey says. He also knew Al Gore was on the board of advisers, putting Massey in the unusual position of squaring off against traditional Democratic party allies.

Massey was beginning to see the writing on the bathroom wall. Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006 and galvanized the green movement. Opposition to the waterless urinal was making plumbers look out of step. They were being painted as antienvironmental at a time when builders increasingly wanted to go green. Massey concluded that he was on the wrong side of the argument. By the end of 2006, he decided to support the urinal’s inclusion in the Uniform Plumbing Code.

But there was a catch. When the code change was finally approved in 2009, it stated that water had to be piped to the waterless urinals. Standard plumbing still has to be done, but the water pipe is simply capped off behind the wall and never used.

Krug thought the new code’s requirement was unnecessary, but he decided not to oppose it. He had been fighting for eight years and was ready to move on. “It’s the cost of doing business in the real world,” he says.

Massey argues that the condition makes sense. If a building owner decides to go back to flush urinals, he’ll blame the plumber if the water isn’t already there.

Waterless urinals have since colonized American men’s rooms—Krug says he has sold 200,000, and a sprinkling of competitors have appeared. Now, after all the heated debate, it’s possible to assess how the urinals function in a variety of environments. The conclusion: Without proper maintenance, there can be problems.

In July 2007, the University of Washington in Seattle decided to do a test. The school had experimented with Falcon and other no-water urinals and wanted to do a thorough study before buying more. It asked Roger van Gelder, a water conservation consultant and proponent of the urinal technology, to do the evaluation. Van Gelder recommended installing new drain piping so the experiment could begin with a clean slate. Six months later, he opened the pipes, which had been installed in a dorm bathroom, and discovered that an oily sludge was significantly blocking the drain lines. It wouldn’t be long before they clogged entirely.

Falcon recommends pouring a bucket of hot water into its urinals to flush out deposits before putting in a new cartridge. But van Gelder presumes the dorm’s janitorial staff didn’t follow this protocol. He doesn’t blame them, he says; the requirement seems counterintuitive. If it were a truly waterless urinal, why require periodic flushing, particularly when it’s a difficult, backbreaking proposition?

Van Gelder also took issue with Falcon’s cartridges. They clogged quickly—sometimes after only 700 uses—and had to be thrown away or recycled. That’s a lot of plastic refuse, which van Gelder didn’t think was very environmentally friendly. And if a janitor didn’t replace a clogged cartridge immediately, a smelly and unsightly mix of urine and blue sealant would pool in the urinal. The university ended up removing all of the waterless devices, and van Gelder is no longer a believer.

There were problems with Falcon and other waterless urinals elsewhere, too. Over the past few years, the California EPA headquarters in Sacramento ran into trouble with the no-flush urinals it had installed: The drain pipes clogged, the urinals stank, and the bathrooms were messy; the units were removed in February 2010. Chicago City Hall and O’Hare International Airport have also removed their waterless urinals, citing clogged pipes. “That’s why it makes sense to plumb water to these things,” says Jim Majerowicz, a Chicago plumber who examined the O’Hare installation. “It’s about saving money for the building owner when they decide to pull these stinky things out.”

Krug counters that the urinals are working in large-scale facilities across the country—they’re a fixture at Rose Bowl Stadium and Las Vegas Motor Speedway. They just have to be maintained properly.

“It does require a little bit of retraining,” says Gaylon Holland, director of maintenance operations for the Temecula Valley Unified School District in Southern California. Holland has installed some 650 Falcon urinals over the past few years and says he had to teach his crew how to take care of them. The effort paid off: Maintenance costs have gone down, and the district is saving huge quantities of water. “Everybody was scared of them at first,” Holland says. “But they work, and they work well.”

Krug says the industry is turning a corner. “People think a urinal is a urinal,” he says. “I thought it was a market ripe for innovation, but it has taken an extraordinary effort to get our little urinal on walls.”

With sales continuing to climb—the total number of flushless urinals installed has more than doubled over the past four years—Krug thinks he can finally put a decade of controversy behind him and focus on exploring new ideas at his urinal laboratory east of Los Angeles. He’s particularly excited about his latest design, the F-7000, which features a patent-pending splash-reducing shape. “Nobody wants a wet pant leg,” he says.

Ever hear of Clivus Multrum? (post #191311, reply #1 of 3)

Ever hear of Clivus Multrum? Their waterless urinals have been in operation since the early 70's. The southbound rest stop on NH Interstate 95 has had a Clivus system in place for many years but its currently under renovation. Not sure if they will stay waterless. There is a pungent odor.

No, I Haven't (post #191311, reply #2 of 3)

but the new type waterless urinals are a great improvement. No smell, if the guys don't piss all over the floor. I thought is was interesting that the unions hired a professional liar to make their case. In a commercial setting, the waste lines the hot and cold and drains for all the lavs, their not going to lose any work over this. They'll just get to extend their breaks a little longer.

Used to be some waterless (post #191311, reply #3 of 3)

Used to be some waterless toilets at a rest stop in the Rockies, I'm thinking along Trail Ridge Road. They were fully "modern" toilets (too much traffic for the old style "waterless"), but they used some sort of recirculating oil or some such in place of water. The oil didn't mix with the water and "other stuff" in the toilets, so it could be recirculated, and the toilets could function in freezing weather (even if you couldn't) without having to be heated.

Dunno if they're still there.

Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. --Herman Melville